Unusual violence, diplomatic progress

May 12, 2002|By Lauren Comiteau. Lauren Comiteau is a freelance journalist who lives in The Hague.

Over the course of a recent couple of weeks in The Hague, Ethiopia and Eritrea resolved their border dispute peacefully, the U.S. ousted the head of a multilateral organization, and the Dutch government collapsed over what happened in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica seven years ago.

And then, the unthinkable happened.

A Dutch far-right candidate for prime minister was gunned down in the parking lot of a radio studio where only minutes before he had given what became his last interview. It was the country's first political assassination since William the Silent was shot to death in 1584.

"The Dutch have lost their smugness," is how one person put it.

For sure, they've lost their innocence.

"I wonder if I'll ever see a prime minister riding a bike or taking a tram again," a 75-year-old friend mused.

"Our institutional facade of tolerance is once against being tested," a Dutch friend and colleague told me.

Pim Fortuyn, the slain political leader who campaigned largely on an anti-immigrant, "the Netherlands is full" platform, was anything but typical. Flashy, in-your-face and openly gay, he was the anti-Dutch politician. As such, he probably got away with saying things (including his infamous slur that Islam is a "backward culture") that nobody else in the consensus-seeking Hague cabal would dare say.

But however repugnant Fortuyn's views--and some of them are repugnant to many here--they've struck a chord with a large number of Dutch voters who handed him more than one-third of the seats during recent local elections in his home city of Rotterdam. They were also expected to--and still may--hand him enough votes in this week's general elections to make the party whose ballot he still heads crucial to the formation of the next coalition government.

In the end, it seems, the Dutch aren't any less scared or any less racist than the rest of us.

That said, there are still lessons--good, bad and ambiguous--to be learned from The Hague.

The Good

Ethiopia and Eritrea have been battling over their border for more than a century. Most recently, a 1998-2000 flare-up of the dispute left tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced.

But even with the fighting over, there was still no formal boundary. As part of a peace deal signed by the former foes in December 2000, they decided to take their border dispute to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague and pledged to abide by whatever border the experts (partly chosen by them) drew up. In closed hearings, maps, old colonial treaties and other evidence were presented, and arguments were made; then, just last month, the new border was revealed.

At first it was made known only to Ethiopia and Eritrea, with Ethiopia claiming it got everything it wanted. But a couple of days later, the ruling was made public. Both sides claimed victory and the moral high ground.

"It's a nice and civilized way to end the dispute," said Cees Roelofsen, a professor at University of Utrecht, who calls arbitration an "acceptable face-saving device" for countries unwilling or unable to accept another's demands. (It's also a cheaper, quicker and more private way to settle a dispute than going to the nearby World Court or fighting a war.)

Now that the line has been drawn on the map, there's still a difficult demarcation process on the ground that has to be carried out, one that will have to contend with land mines and the movement of displaced people. But by accepting the verdict, the two sides are now bound to accept its implementation.

The mere fact of a peaceful resolution to a long-standing dispute led UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, when addressing the Security Council on the issue, to say that for once, he had "good news."

The Bad

"Because we are the remaining global superpower, every time we do anything for whatever motivation, there's always an emotional appeal that the U.S. is trying to bully someone. It's the inherent reaction to everything we do. So everything the U.S. does is a hard sell."

That was the explanation offered by a senior State Department official (whom I cannot name) to the rest of the world on why it may have looked like the Americans were trying to overthrow the leader of the international organization responsible for ridding the world of chemical weapons when in fact they were not.

In an increasingly bitter and public two-month battle to unseat Jose Bustani, the director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Americans--who until recently supported the Brazilian diplomat--described his leadership with catchall phrases like "mismanagement," "negligence" and full of "ill-conceived initiatives." They were so short on detail, though, that member states were reportedly left booing when the U.S. failed to present the evidence it said it had to back up its claims during an emergency session on Bustani's future.